Mini Golf: A Game of Death

On this occasion, as a boy younger than 5 years old, I went to spend the weekend over at my grandparents. There house smelled of cinnamon and old newspaper. After being there maybe an hour, we all went to Forsythe’s miniature golf course to play a game. As a child, I was a lot more hyper; one might even say I was “Wild Out”, so my favorite thing to do with a putter on the miniature golf course was to slap shot the ball. The feeling I got from watching the ball bouncing off of everything it hit was very amusing to me. On the first hole, I probably took around six shots to get the ball in the hole, seeing as I saw it to be a lot more to drive the ball then to move it towards the hole. Now, my grandparents didn’t really approve of my unorthodox golfing style, but they didn’t really prevent me from doing it, at least not during the first two holes. As my Grandpa recorded everybody’s scores, my grandma and I moved to the next hole. I placed my ball on the ground preparing to tee off when I heard my Grandpa say something to my Grandma that momentarily distracted her. As she looked away, I swung the club back as hard as I could which flung my Grandmother’s glasses from her face ten feet or so plopping right into a water fountain. The frame was  bent and the lenses were shattered.  This is what one would describe as an, “Oh….Crap.” moment. It is hard to think of a more jaw dropping instance then when you hit your Grandma in the face with a golf club.

                Luckily my Grandma didn’t get hurt, I had managed only to take her glasses off, and not smash her face in. Her glasses were however destroyed. After the second hole, we left Forsythe’s and took a trip to the mall to replace my Grandma’s glasses. My Grandparents were very cool about this incident and thankfully didn’t get to upset. They understood that it was an accident, and I must have spent the whole car ride there and hour long wait for new glasses apologizing to them.

                Since that day, I have been a lot more careful with my golf swing and we all look back at the incident in a humorous light. My Grandma often gives me snack foods that taste good whenever I see her; we have not gone golfing since.

Christmas

My ex and her husband had tried - and failed - to break it easy to my 6-year-old son Charlie that Santa isn't real. On Christmas Eve, I read Charlie The Night Before Christmas... before receiving an unexpected visitor on my roof. When a man was startled by my calling out he fell of the roof, and then the Santa impersonator disappeared, leaving only an 8-reindeer sleigh and a suit with instructions to put it on if he's involved in an accident. I did, and I was transported around the town dropping gifts through chimneys until I was taken to the North Pole and informed by a group who claimed they were elves that I was now Santa. Charlie was proud of my new job, though I was scepticle about what actually happened. Then my hair turned white, my beard refused to stay shaved, I gained weight inexplicably, I even had a sudden love of junk food... Now I accepted it, there's just one problem: how to keep it  a secret from my disbelieving family?

Memoir

It was last December, and I was going to go to the Steelers game with my cousin Brandon. My mom was the youngest of five kids, so all of my cousins are older than me; some are a lot older than me. So the fact that I was going to hang out with Brandon was pretty cool because it was as if I was one of the older guys.

I have hung out with Brandon and my other cousin on numerous occasions, but this was just seemed cool. I went over to his house Thursday after school for the Thursday night game. We hung out for a bit, and then we walked down his street to get to the T-train stop.  We talked a lot about the game bop-it and how his was supposedly haunted; it would turn on at random. We rode downtown, got sandwiches, ate them by PNC Park, and then went to Heinz field for the game. It was a blowout against the Panthers, plus we got on the cameras for NFL network before the game started. So all in all it was a great time. 

After the game we went back to his house and watched TV and ordered a pizza online from dominoes. If you have never ordered a pizza from dominos online, I recommend doing so. It is a very strange and awesome experience. There is something called the pizza tracker, and if you leave the browser open on the computer, it updates you on the progress of your pizza, but there’s all  of these sound effects like explosions and guitars, and the guy is singing to you how far along your pizza is.  So when we were watching Robin Hood Men in Tights in the other room, and every five minutes or so you would hear the dominoes  website singing that your pizza has just been put into the oven as an explosion goes off, it was pretty awesome. After the pizza got there, his older sister Shannon and her fiancé Kyle came home, as well as my other cousin Brian and they all had some pizza. Later on we put on TV Land and watched a Rosanne marathon for a bit. Later, The Nanny came on, I hate the Nanny so we started looking for other things to watch, and we realized that home improvement would be on later, which was totally awesome because I had not seen that show in a long time, and me and Brandon began a deep discussion about the noise that Tim Allen makes at the beginning of the theme song, and countless times throughout the series. We changed the channel for the about fifteen minutes to watch a ghost show, it wasn’t ghost hunters. It was more like some kind of paranormal accounts television show, you know like people discussing their encounters with the dead. So as the night carried on, we continued with joking conversations and just hanging out with each other.  Around 4 in the morning, Home Improvement came on and we heard the noise that Tim Allen makes, which finally restored order to the universe.

From this night I have formed a much more personal relationship with my cousin, and Dominoes Pizza.